President Obama, his weird circle of advisors (czars), and the ideologues within the Democrat Party led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Harry Reid only have a few months left to completely destroy the separation of powers between the States and the federal government.

A major battle is looming over the Tenth Amendment which declares that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Almost everywhere one looks today, the States are in rebellion to the overreaching of the federal government. The process involved is called nullification, a legal theory that a U.S. State has the right to nullify, i.e., invalidate, any federal law deemed unconstitutional. Since the Supreme Court moves at a glacial pace, the States through their legislatures have taken the lead in many cases.

When the co-founder of an organization criticizes the people who basically take it over, it’s safe to say that the organization has been co-opted by someone for some reason other than the original intention of it’s founders.

In 2007, the modern tea party movement took shape, in a vastly different form than it now presents itself. Spurred by an impending recession, a government overrun by deception and corruption, and an unprecedented expansion of government under eight years of “conservative” leadership, the first modern day tea partiers had positive causes of action: honesty, respect for the rule of law, and protection of the rights of the smallest minority; the individual.

In late 2007, on the anniversary of the original Boston Tea Party, positive protestors laid hope in a solution. In a 24 hours period, in concert with symbolic and peaceful re-enactments of the Boston Tea Party in over 50 cities across the country, energetic tea partiers dumped over 5.2 million dollars into a long-shot presidential campaign to support a candidate that embodied honesty, respect, and sincerity in the pursuit strict constitutional leadership. The goal: to entrust our highest office to a man of principles, who would be shackled by a devotion to the constitution, rather than obligations to special interests.

It’s nice to see that some of our elected officials are starting to get it. This is a state representative, which is where this movement seems to be starting (at the state level). We need to elect more people like this at state and local levels (and, where possible, at the national level).

This summer, legislators from several states met to discuss the steps needed to restore our Constitutional Republic. The federal government has ignored the many state sovereignty resolutions from 2009 notifying it to cease and desist its current and continued overreach. The group decided it was time to actively counter the tyranny emanating from Washington D.C.

From those discussions it became clear three things needed to happen.

State Legislatures need to pass 10 key pieces of legislation “with teeth” to put the federal government back in its place.

The people must pass the legislation through the Initiative process if any piece of the legislative agenda fails.

County Sheriffs must reaffirm and uphold their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

(CNSNews.com) – Regardless of what the U.S. Congress decides about health care reform, a growing number of states are standing up for individuals’ freedom of choice when it comes to purchasing – or not purchasing – health insurance.

Several Kansas Republicans have introduced a state constitutional amendment that would protect the right of Kansas residents to make their own health care choices. That makes Kansas the 19th state where legislators have introduced, or will introduce, such legislation.

The proposed Kansas amendment preserves the right of individuals to pay directly for medical care — something that is not allowed in single-payer countries such as Canada. It also prohibits any individual from being penalized for not purchasing government-defined insurance.

Under the amendment, any state attempt to require an individual to purchase health insurance–or forbid an individual from purchasing services outside of the government-established health care system–would be rendered unconstitutional.Continue reading →

You would think common sense would be enough, but no, we need the Obamessiah to issue a Federal decree barring it. Now it’s officially a bad thing to do.

From ComputerWorld:Transportation secretary at end of Distracted Driving Summit: Order ‘shows the federal government is leading by example’

By Matt Hamblen

October 1, 2009 03:00 PM ET

Computerworld – A two-day Distracted Driving Summit in Washington concluded Thursday, after experts raised multiple thorny questions on how to reduce cell phone usage and texting while driving, with a big emphasis placed on driver and employer responsibility.

After mentioning that President Obama had just signed an executive order that forbids all federal employees from engaging in texting while driving government vehicles, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood urged private sector employers to avoid calling workers on their cell phones as they drive home from work.

LaHood also announced that his department would ban text messaging altogether, restrict cell phone use by truck and interstate bus drivers and disqualify school bus drivers from receiving commercial driver’s licenses if they have been convicted of texting while driving.

His department also plans to make permanent some restrictions placed on the use of cell phones in rail operations. However, he did not offer further details.

“Employers need to change their mindset, too, and if you know your staff has left for the day, do not expect them to instantly return a phone call or IM when they’e driving home,” LaHood said in a concluding address.

Obama’s executive order, signed Thursday, also bars federal workers from texting with any government-owned electronic equipment while they are driving, and bars any texting while driving their own privately owned vehicles while on official government business, LaHood said.

The executive order “shows the federal government is leading by example” and “sends a signal that distracted driving [is] dangerous,” he added.

But LaHood was noncommittal about proposed laws, including a U.S. Senate bill that would require states to ban texting while driving or face partial loss of federal highway funding.

LaHood showed a willingness to work on legislation, saying, “We will work with Congress and state and local governments to ensure than the issue of distracted driving is appropriately addressed.”

He also said “high visibility enforcement” of drunk driving and seat belt laws had been effective and could work with distracted driving and related laws.

But LaHood seemed to focus on drivers’ personal responsibility as his key message. “Driving while distracted should feel wrong, just like driving without a seat belt or [while] drinking,” he said. “We are not going to break all bad habits, but will raise awareness.”

LaHood said driving while using a cell phone or texting is “personally irresponsible and socially unacceptable behavior, but in the end we won’t make the problem go away by just passing laws … We cannot legislate behavior to get results to improve road safety.”

“People need to use common sense and show common decency to other drivers,” he said.

He called distracted driving “an epidemic” and referred to the summit as a “tremendous start … that will lead all of us to save lives and save injuries.” At the start of the conference, LaHood said that in 2008 nearly 6,000 people died in the U.S. in crashes involving a distracted or inattentive driver. That figure is about one-sixth of the 37,000 deaths last year resulting from motor vehicle accidents.

LaHood and several of the panelists who spoke urged parents to restrict their teenage children from using cell phones while driving.

However, the value of specialized training programs to teach the dangers of distracted driving came under question by some of the assembled experts.

Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, cast a blunt criticism of such efforts, citing years of research. “It would be wonderful to have training programs for teens to recognize the risks they take [by texting while driving], and change their driving dramatically,” he said.

“But our experience with education programs for teens or even ticketed drivers who take remedial training … is that essentially the programs have no effect,” Lund said. “What they learn is to avoid tickets, but not typically to avoid crashes.”

Lund supported calls by several experts at the summit to find new methods that can reduce crashes caused by distracted driving. “We need to find out what works … All this education doesn’t do much good,” he said.

“Nearly all US government employees and contractors are subject to mandatory annual information security briefings. This year the official briefing flatly states that all downloaded music is stolen. The occasionally breathless tone of the briefing and the various minor errors contained therein are funny but the real eye-opener is a ‘secure the building’ exercise where employees stumble across security problems and resolve them. According to the material, the correct response to an employee who is downloading music is to shout ‘That’s stealing!’ No mention is made of more-free licenses, public domain works, or any other legitimate download. If this were a single agency or department that had made a mistake in their training material it might not be so shocking. But this is a government-wide training package that’s being absorbed by hundreds of thousands of federal employees, both civilian and military. If you see a co-worker downloading music, they’re stealing. Period. Who woulda thunk it? Somebody should mirror this. Who wants to bet that copies will become hard to find if clued-in technogeeks take notice and start making noise?”

The real US unemployment rate is 16 percent if persons who have dropped out of the labor pool and those working less than they would like are counted, a Federal Reserve official said Wednesday.”If one considers the people who would like a job but have stopped looking — so-called discouraged workers — and those who are working fewer hours than they want, the unemployment rate would move from the official 9.4 percent to 16 percent, said Atlanta Fed chief Dennis Lockhart.

He underscored that he was expressing his own views, which did “do not necessarily reflect those of my colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee,” the policy-setting body of the central bank.

Lockhart pointed out in a speech to a chamber of commerce in Chattanooga, Tennessee that those two categories of people are not taken into account in the Labor Department’s monthly report on the unemployment rate. The official July jobless rate was 9.4 percent.

Lockhart, who heads the Atlanta, Georgia, division of the Fed, is the first central bank official to acknowledge the depth of unemployment amid the worst US recession since the Great Depression.